[yannickt]

Are there that many Canadian companies (as opposed to US companies with satellite offices in Canada) capitalizing on AI? If not, does Canada really "get it?"

[levesque]

I think he's capitalizing on the fact that the recent AI breakthroughs in deep learning originated from Montreal (Bengio et al.) and Toronto (Hinton et al.), thus all the big companies want to have satellite offices nearby and Canada becomes hot for AI. Nowadays, there are a lot of students graduating from those labs who may or may not stay in Canada and build on this expertise.

Other than that, I don't think Canada gets it more than the US, for instance. Government is shooting money into AI now that they realized there was massive potential for growth, but I think it's still early to see how many Canadian AI companies will emerge from this (Element AI would be an early one).

[mfoy_]

I do think that Canada is more... open to suggestion than America. So perhaps he merely means that Canadians don't mind being guinea pigs for the greater good as much? Canada is more of a "social capitalism", as opposed to America.

[rublev]

Absolutely not. Nevermind even starting to talk about a specific niche of tech like AI. Article is completely false on almost all counts.

[jdross]

Geoff Hinton is from University of Toronto. Waterloo is great source of talent as well

[busterarm]

But the provinces Canada most needs to develop right now are probably far less desirable to most UT & Waterloo grads than a move to the US.

[malandrew]

U-Waterloo is its own special thing. It's hardly reflective of the rest of Canada. More universities need to take the U-Waterloo approach of work experience interspersed with academic study.

[yannickt]

I don't understand why these questions are being downvoted.

[doctorRetro]

Canadian here: I couldn't name one. I'm not a Trudeau hater (or fanboy, for that matter), but this is definitely all hollow lip service.

Edit: I'm also not really sure what he means by "get it".